In partnership with Future Earth & CJLO 1690AM, the Worlds We Want is a new podcast exploring cutting-edge research, projects and people working for positive transitions in the Anthropocene. Can hope trump apocalypse?

What then ofourfuture? Yours and mine. How do we, as a
society, think about the future? How do we think about our future
becoming better for more people? How might we think, plan, and work
towards the kind of worlds we want - rather than the kind of worlds
we just stumble upon?

Well, on today’s show we talked
to some people who wake up to these kinds of questions every
day.

We’ll start with a conversation
that we had one-afternoon last week, in an unusually warm boardroom
in downtown Montreal. We joined a conference call with a few of the
folks working at Policy Horizons - namely Marcus Ballinger and
Pierre-Olivier Desmarchais.

Next up is our conversation with
Dr. Andrew Merrie from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. We spoke
with him about his project, Radical Ocean Futures, which uses
science fiction prototyping and mixed media to imagine multiple
futures, based on emerging research into oceans.

The people
interviewed in this episode are:

Pierre-Olivier
Desmarchais is a policy researcher at Policy Horizons, a think-tank in the
federal government of Canada’s public service with the mandate “to
identify emerging policy issues and explore policy challenges and
opportunities for Canada, as well as to help build foresight
literacy and capacity across the Government of Canada.” He is also
a PhD candidate in law at Laval University where his doctoral
thesis class="graf graf--li graf-after--li">Marcus Ballinger is Senior
Policy Adviser at Environment and Climate Change
Canada, currently on assignment at Policy Horizons. He has 20 years of
experience in international affairs and policy related to
multilateral environmental agreements, trade and development.

Dr. Andrew Merrie
finished his PhD in Sustainability Science at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, based at
Stockholm University, in 2016 and currently works as a
communications officer at the Centre. He’s one of the principal
authors of the Radical Ocean Futures project
which seeks to “explore tools that can help us to think creatively
and imaginatively about our future oceans and assess how unexpected
changes, along with human responses to those changes, may play out
in a complex world that is, at its heart, surprising.” You can read
more about it in WIRED Magazine here or even in
Nature!

About the Podcast

In partnership with Future Earth & CJLO 1690AM, the Worlds We Want is a podcast exploring cutting-edge research, projects and people working for positive change for society and the environment. We talk with people who are working in a variety of roles to construct the worlds they want to see.